I will say I am shocked by the response. I thought everyone who could afford a new car already bought one when prices first dropped ridiculously.
they tried that with the building stimulus saying you had to buy american building materials, and it almost started a huge war with the whole free trade agreement
good. Free trade is costing us tons of jobs. If it wasn’t for the fact that China is the one that buys all of our govt debt, we could do away with it.
Who knows about that thing Reagan did with Japan to limit imports once? It was before I was born, but I hear it worked.
Look at how much of our income in this country is based on other counties buying our goods. If we got rid of free trade, other countries would stop buying from us and put us into big problems.
Fuck American jobs. I rather pay the price for a foreign good than 300% more just becuase its produced in the US. No one in the US will do jobs for cheap as we have advanced in our standard of living and society. We will build plants in 3rd world countries and pay them pennies a week (which in their standard of living is a lot) and then as that area advances, we move to another region.
We buy a lot more goods abroad than we sell. We are a net importer by almost 200 billion dollars. If we got rid of free trade, we’d make all that shit here. Sure, it would cost more, but everyone would have more money, and it would be higher quality, and we’d stop the race to the bottom to see what country can pay their employees shittier…
Lots of people fall into this thinking but it will never work. We rely too much on outside goods to fuel our economy and survive. We start the fire by cutting off free trade from other countries, we lose a lot of imports that we require to function in the standard of living today.
We went into this in a economics class when some people did a presentation my senior year as to why this system fails. One of the few interesting points of economics.
I did a presentation with a group in an MBA economics class on how it would work. There are logistical concerns and you don’t want to make it a full-out war on free trade, but make it targeted. I know my economics.
Specifically, we should have tariffs on cheap imported shit from developing nations. Most of our free trade, like that with canada and the EU, is perfectly fine, but this is the trouble spot. They have unfair cost advantages with lack of regulations, minimum wages, environmental concerns, etc., and also they are a huge negative outflow of money and jobs, and in turn our tax base, all because the public doesnt want to pay an extra couple per cent for better quality stuff that’s manufactured here. It should be based on their governments’ degree of control over business, and could be lifted if they take away the businesses’ free rein to do whatever the hell they please, and hence, their ridiculous cost advantages.
I am sure there is ways to do it but if the US decides to limit free trade to simply better itself and help its economy, its going to lead to global problems. We rely so much on imports of raw materials to keep our country going and there is a large number of them that we can not produce on our own in the scale that our economy and way of life needs. A perfect example is oil. We do not drill into our own supplies in Alaska and anywhere else becuase of conservation laws and even if tomorrow they decided to tap all our oil sources, it would be a large number of years before we can even match the output with our consumption.
Personally, the US wants to get us back on track they need to:
a) cut the billions of dollars in aid we give to Africa
b) create a flat 5% tax through all levels of income. there is been a lot of studies and if the government put effort to this, 5% would be all is needed from everyone to have a surplus in budget. they also would require the IRS to step into the CEOs who are drawing $1 a year salaries but getting millions in stock options and create a system to tax these hidden assets.
c) reduce our useless wars (war on terror, war on drugs, etc.)
d) less bailouts, more government bottom up programs like cash for clunkers. i have never seen so many people at a car dealer the last few weeks and the response was huge. the government put 4 billion into this program and look at the turn out. they need more of these to get us back going and turn away from the 800 billion dollar bailouts of companies.
\just my little rant/
I thought it was under review and not suspened as of yet? My father called West-Herr Chev about it. West-Herr themselves is stopping because the process is terribly slow.
less goods imported…i would be out of a job 
o well
Its still running through the weekend:
On Friday, the Obama administration said it was working with Congress to try to get more money and that Clunkers deal certificates would be honored through the weekend.
2 billion more approved for useage by the goverment
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-07-30-cash-for-clunkers-program-suspended_N.htm
atleast post a link or something
we were still taking in cars on trade, our secertary is working thru the weekend because the website to put all the info into is so slow and takes forever, she said it was 1/2 to 1 hour for 1 page…
Only problem i have with this is that it has to get 18mpg or worse to qualify, so if i try trade in my 89 prelude that gets 20 mpg for something that gets 10-8 mpg better i get just trade in value( >$1000) ? Why not just have it for increasing your mpg by a said amount instead of having a maximum mpg?
Hmm… being one of those that said this program wouldn’t do much, I was surprised it “sold out” so fast, until I realized there was a backlog from July 1 that the system was processing. There probably was a decrease in demand in June as well, given the anticipation for this program.
And ultimately, I don’t think this will do much when the market overall has tanked badly. What people don’t realize is the size of the USDM. Even if $4B is spent on this, we’ll still be millions of units down from previous years. Heck, even what was currently listed as sold constitutes a new car purchase by 0.008% of the US population. Oh, and the number sold is still less than the Nov 2008 sales of the outgoing last-gen Ford F150 (37,911 units).
Didn’t they blow like $19 million on the website? Nice to see it is user friendly. lol
I went to GM’s website typed in 99 Cadillac Escalade, and it will only give me 3,500 for it… but i can get a New Camaro 6.2liter Manual 6spd lol!
No that was Recovery.gov. Lol.
This program was pretty cool but I wish they made a few changes. One being that if the car was registered and insured for a year but did not run would still qualify. Reason being is that I know two people who have had mid 90’s cars that a major issue happened to it and can not take advantage of this offer. Seems like it would really increase the turnout more and would be more practical. The year of registration/insurance would prevent people from going to a junk yard and getting any car.